Bitcoin feud splits the currency in two

This morning, bitcoin split into two currencies — the original and Bitcoin Cash. The hard forking, as it’s known, resulted from heated debate over the cryptocurrency’s future, since the aging tech behind blockchain has prevented easy scaling. While a new code upgrade called SegWit2x was introduced last week as a compromise, dissenters still decided to start backing Bitcoin Cash and fork off in their own direction. The community anxiously waited for financial fallout after the schism, but aside from a temporary 7 percent drop in bitcoin value this morning, the split seems to have avoided disaster. Whether Bitcoin Cash sticks around is another question.

The spat is rooted in bitcoin’s success: A year ago, bitcoin’s value hovered around $500 and slowly climbed through the new year, but started shooting up in April to top out at $3,000 in June. That led to a higher volume of transactions, which the blockchain technology — the cryptocurrency’s ledger that verifies and tracks transactions, recording the latest in unchangeable “blocks” — was struggling to keep up with. The bitcoin network can only support 1MB per minute or seven transactions per second, according to The Telegraph, which is paltry compared to the thousands per second run through financial webs supporting credit cards, for example. To keep bitcoin growing, this number would have to go up.

But the cryptocurrency community was split on how to do it. Two competing strategies arose: Increase each block’s code limit, which would store more data per block but increase server loads processing transactions, or shift smaller transactions outside the blockchain. The SegWit2x tech includes a bit of both, pushing some data outside the main network and promising to double the block size to 2MB by November. It was enough of a compromise to avert a serious and widespread cleft in the community.

That wasn’t enough for some, who started backing Bitcoin Cash, which chose the former route and increased its blocks to 8MB. Today’s hard fork, which essentially launched the cryptocurrency into being, boosted its value from $200 to $370. Some bitcoin exchanges, where users make transactions and store their coins, will recognize Bitcoin Cash, including Kraken and ViaBTC — but others like Coinbase and Poloniex said they wouldn’t as they’re uncertain it’ll stick around. If you’re still not sure what this means for your supply of cryptocurrency, there are plenty of resources online to help, including Coindesk’s guide for the transition.

The future of the brand-new cryptocurrency depends on more users and investors supporting it, and it’s not clear whether it will survive into the future. For now, split from bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash must jockey with the other alternatives to the leading cryptocurrency like Ethereum and Litecoin.

Source: The Telegraph

Apple Pay Coming to Finland, Denmark, Sweden and UAE Later This Year

Apple is planning to expand Apple Pay to Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and United Arab Emirates before the end of the calendar year, the company announced in today’s third quarter earnings call. No specific information was provided on a potential launch date, beyond the announcement that it’s coming later in the year.

Apple doesn’t appear to have established Apple Pay web pages for the four countries, something that typically happens as it prepares for an Apple Pay launch.

Over the course of the last few years, Apple has been working “rapidly” to expand Apple Pay to additional countries, and it is now available in the U.S., UK, China, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, France, Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, Italy, Taiwan, and Ireland.

Along with Sweden and Finland, rumors suggest Apple is also working to bring Apple Pay to Belgium, South Korea, Germany, and Ukraine.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tag: earnings
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Apple CEO Tim Cook Evades Questions on Alleged Plans to Build Three ‘Big’ U.S. Factories

Last week, United States President Donald Trump told The Wall Street Journal that Apple had plans to build three “big, big, big” manufacturing plants in the United States, a statement that allegedly came from Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Unsurprisingly, Cook was questioned about the president’s statement during the question and answer portion of today’s earnings call, and he deftly dodged it by highlighting Apple’s overall efforts to increase jobs in the United States.

Apple CEO Tim Cook at the Executive Tech Summit at Trump Tower in December of 2016
Cook said Apple has created two million jobs in the United States, across three separate categories. The first, responsible for about 2/3rds of those jobs, is the App Store and the Apple developer community.

Cook said Apple is making an enormous effort in this area by encouraging children and college students to get into coding through Swift-based curriculum that’s been introduced in schools around the world.

The second category, according to Cook, is Apple’s manufacturing purchases. Last year, Apple purchased $50 billion in goods and services from U.S. based suppliers, and has been aiming to increase that. Apple in May announced a $1 billion Advanced Manufacturing Fund meant to encourage innovation among U.S.-based manufacturers. Corning became the first recipient of the fund in mid-May, and Cook says the money will be used to expand the company’s Kentucky plant to make innovative glass.

“There are several plants that can benefit from having some investment to grow, expand, or set up ship in the U.S. for the first time,” said Cook. “We’re excited.”

The third category relates to Apple’s own facilities in the United States, like its Cupertino-based campuses that employ thousands of employees. Cook didn’t have much to say about this category, but he hinted at announcements coming later this year, potentially giving some weight to Trump’s statement about job creation.

“Two thirds of our employee base is in the United States, despite only one third of revenue being here,” Cook said. “We have some things we’ll say about that later in the year.”

Cook said that Apple does feel that it has a responsibility to create jobs in the United States. “We do view that we have a responsibility in the United States to increase economic activity and increase jobs. Apple could only have been created here,” Cook said.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tags: Tim Cook, earnings, Donald Trump
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Tim Cook Says Apple is ‘Very Focused on Autonomous Systems’

It’s no secret that Apple is working on an autonomous driving system, thanks to statements from Apple CEO Tim Cook, information published by the DMV, and the presence of Apple’s autonomous test vehicles on the road, but during today’s earnings call, Cook re-emphasized Apple’s deep interest in the technology, and he even hinted Apple’s work on autonomy could be used for more than vehicles.

“In terms of autonomous systems, what we’ve said is that we are very focused on autonomous systems from a core technology point of view,” Cook said. “We do have a large project going, and we’re making a big investment in this from our point of view.”

Cook went on to call autonomy “the mother of all AI projects,” a statement he’s shared before in an interview with Bloomberg. Cook also hinted that Apple has other autonomous projects in the works beyond a car system.

“Autonomous systems can be used in a variety of ways — a vehicle is only one, but there are many different areas of it. And I don’t want to go any further with that,” he said.

Apple has presumably been working on an autonomous driving system since 2014, when rumors of its efforts to create an electric vehicle first surfaced. Apple has now moved away from creating a full vehicle and is said to be focusing on self-driving technology instead.

Since April, Apple has been testing its autonomous driving system in several Lexus RX450h SUVs, which can be spotted on the roads around its Cupertino headquarters.

Related Roundup: Apple Car
Tags: Tim Cook, earnings
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Apple Increased AirPods Production Capacity, But Still Unable to Meet Demand

During today’s earnings call covering the third fiscal quarter of 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook briefly mentioned the company’s super popular hard-to-come-by wireless earphones, the AirPods.

According to Cook, production capacity has been bumped up, but because of the high level of demand, Apple is still unable to make enough to reach supply/demand balance.

We’re also seeing incredible enthusiasm for AirPods. 98 percent customer satisfaction based on Creative Strategy’s survey. We have increased production capacity for AirPods and are working very hard to get them to customers as quickly as we can, but we are still not able to meet the strong level of demand.

Priced at $159, Apple’s AirPods are wire-free earphones that feature Bluetooth and an Apple-designed W1 chip for a better connection and simple transfers between different devices. AirPods are equipped with an infrared sensor to detect when they’re in the ear, and they support a range of touch-based gestures.

Since launch, AirPod supplies have been severely constrained and ship out from the online Apple Store in the U.S. in six weeks. That six week mark has not budged since December, but Apple retail stores occasionally have them in stock as do third-party retailers like Best Buy.

Tags: earnings, AirPods
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Amazon taps ‘Boondocks’ creator for alt-history show ‘Black America’

Amazon could be getting another alternate history show of the likes of The Man in the High Castle. A series called Black America is under development and it’s centered around a reality where southern states were granted to African Americans as reparations for slavery. Set in the present day, the sovereign nation of New Colonia — made up of what was previously Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama — is outpacing a rapidly declining US, a country it’s had a tumultuous relationship with over the past 150 years.

The series comes from Straight Outta Compton producer Will Packer and The Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder and it has been in the works for some time. It was the announcement of HBO’s alternate reality drama Confederate and its modern-day, legal slavery storyline that pushed the Black America creators to open up about the premise of the series. As Packer told Deadline, “It felt this was the appropriate time to make sure that audiences and the creative community knew that there was a project that preexisted and we are pretty far down the road with it.” Though he didn’t want to comment about Confederate directly, Packer said, “Slavery is far too real and far too painful, and we still see the manifestations of it today as a country for me to ever view that as a form of entertainment.”

Packer told Deadline that the concept of reparation has always intrigued him, “You would be hard pressed to find many black Americans who have not thought about the concept of reparation, what would happen if reparations were actually given,” and added, “I thought it was a tremendous opportunity to delve into the story, to do it right.”

Black America is still being developed and Amazon hasn’t officially picked it up yet, but the series offers a very different and far more interesting storyline than what HBO’s upcoming series brings to the table. Packer said Black America “will speak to where we are now and the mistakes this country has made and things we should do going forward.”

Source: Deadline

Apple Has Now Sold Over 1.2 Billion iPhones

During today’s earnings call covering the third quarter of 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple has now sold 1.2 billion cumulative iPhones since the device was first introduced in 2007.

Apple sold its 1 billionth iPhone back in July of 2016, so in the last year, the company has sold another 200 million devices. According to Apple’s earnings results, iPhone sales were at 41 million devices in the third quarter alone, bringing in more than $24.8 billion.

According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, sales of the current-generation iPhone 7 Plus have been impressive and are “up dramatically” compared to sales of the iPhone 6s Plus in 2016. Sales of both the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus are up “strong double digits” compared to the year-ago quarter.

Since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Apple has introduced new features and improvements with each successive device. This year, we’re expecting to see Apple unveil the iPhone 8, a radically redesigned device with an edge-to-edge OLED display, no Home button, and a new front-facing camera system that enables facial recognition technology.

Tag: earnings
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Apple’s Services Revenue Up 22% in 3Q 2017, Sets a New All-Time Quarterly Record

Revenue from Apple’s Services category, which includes Apple Music, Apple Pay, AppleCare, iTunes, iCloud, and the App Store, grew an impressive 22 percent year over year according to Apple’s third quarter earnings results, reaching a new all-time high.

In 3Q 2017, Services brought in $7.3 billion, up from $6 billion in the year-ago quarter.

According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, the company’s Services category is the size of a Fortune 100 company, a milestone Apple hit “sooner than expected.”

Apple often attributes much of the growth of its Services category to the App Store, and that continues to be the case this quarter. According to Apple CFO Luca Maestri, App Store revenue was up, as was Apple Music revenue and revenue from iCloud services.

iOS 11 will bring a whole new App Store experience, splitting out Games and Apps into separate tabs and introducing a new section that allows Apple to better highlight the wide variety of apps that are available in the App Store, offering up a range of editorial picks to improve app discovery.

Tags: App Store, iTunes
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NASA says exoplanet Proxima b can’t keep an Earth-like atmosphere

Why it matters to you

Although an Earth-like atmosphere isn’t the sole requirement for life to emerge, it is important for life as we know it.

Our neighbor solar system Alpha Centauri looked inviting last August when a team of astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) confirmed the existence of an exoplanet in the habitable zone around the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. As its name implies, Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our own sun, so the planet, Proxima b, is the closest potentially habitable exoplanet to Earth.

But if agencies were considering sending probes to Proxima b, a new NASA study suggests they should reconsider. The Earth-sized planet probably would not be able to maintain an Earth-like atmosphere, according to the study and that means life as we know it would be practically impossible.

Proxima b is just about four light-years away. Although ESO confirmed its presence by detecting subtle fluctuations in the star’s movement, no one has seen it pass in front of its host star. That means scientists have not yet been able to apply their conventional methods for studying the planet’s atmosphere, so they instead generated models to determine how well its atmosphere held up to its sun.

“We decided to take the only habitable planet we know of so far — Earth — and put it where Proxima b is,” Katherine Garcia-Sage, NASA space scientist and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

In their model, Garcia-Sage and her team swapped Earth for Proxima b, and saw that our planet would be unable to hold onto its atmosphere due to Proxima Centauri’s extreme radiation and frequent solar flares. Proxima b experiences radiation hundreds of time more powerful than Earth does from our sun, which causes molecules as light as hydrogen and as heavy oxygen to get stripped from the planet. As a result, Proxima Centauri would cause an Earth-like atmosphere to degrade 10,000 times faster than Earth’s currently does, according to the study.

“Things can get interesting if an exoplanet holds on to its atmosphere, but Proxima b’s atmospheric loss rates here are so high that habitability is implausible,” said Jeremy Drake, co-author and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “This questions the habitability of planets around such red dwarfs in general.”

The NASA study was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Hundreds of fraudulent trading apps pulled from Google Play, Apple App Store

Why it matters to you

Google Play and the Apple App Store are a little safer thanks to an investigation that found fraudulent binary trading apps were scamming people out of their money.

The App Store and Google Play Store both just got a little safer thanks to an investigation conducted by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) that exposed hundreds of unlicensed trading apps and resulted in them being removed from the online app stores. The probe found many of the apps were scamming people out of their money.

According to a report by ASIC, the investigation specifically focused on so-called binary options trading, which basically encourages investors to bet on whether a share will rise or fall over a certain period of time. There are some licensed and legitimate binary trading platform, but there were also 330 non-licensed ones on the App Store and Google Play Store.

The investigation didn’t just result in many apps being pulled — Apple even went so far as to change its developer guidelines, and directly banned binary trading apps from the App Store, the report said. Binary trading apps were pulled around the world — not just in Australia.

Many of the apps had somewhat grand claims as to how much money users could make. One app, for example, claimed that users could make “up to 90 percent in less than an hour,” while another said users could make “around 85 percent profitable signals from the top traders to guarantee the safe trading.”

Though Apple and Google reacted quickly to the scams by removing the apps, it’s unlikely that many of the victims will ever get their money back because the majority of the companies behind the apps are located in countries that put them out of reach of regulators in the U.S., Australia, or the U.K.

“We were encouraged with the speed both entities removed the relevant apps identified by ASIC from their respective app stores. We also note that Apple recently changed its review guidelines to state that apps that facilitate binary options trading will not be permitted in its app store,” ASIC said in its report.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Apple pull apps from the App Store in recent weeks. Just last week, the company removed a host of VPN apps from the Chinese App Store in an attempt to comply with local cyber laws. It’s expected that similar moves will happen in Russia on or before November 1, when stricter cybersecurity laws are set to go into effect.